I am pleased to have this Web Page completed before the opening of the Terraces on Mt. Carmel. This experience of pioneering, conveyed in part on this website, has taken place mostly in epochs three and four of the Formative Age. Epoch five has just opened four months ago and epoch two was in its last eight months when this pioneering venture began.

Many will find this material too wordy, too divergent, not focused enough on the subject of pioneering, not sequential enough to convey the narrative of my experience in a sensible fashion. I can understand this criticism. But this was not my intent when I set out to construct this Web Page. I have already written an autobiographical account in excess of 60,000 words. That account is sequential, ordered, begins in the 1950s and goes through to this year, 2001. That autobiographical statement is not on this Web Page. Perhaps at some future time that autobiography may be published or put on this site. But that time is not yet.

Neither it, nor this Web Page, is intended as a manual for pioneers; nor is it an intensive analysis of the pioneering experience. Rather, it is a pot-pourri of my own writing, my own thoughts, my own experiences, some reflections on the nearly half a century that has been my involvement with a religion which I feel has the future in its bones.

For now this pot-pourri of essays, interviews, poetry, prose and various odds-and-ends will tell something of my experience of nearly forty years on the homefront and in the international field of pioneering. It will tell of some of my thoughts about a wide range of subjects, will provide a taste of about 250,000 words from the two to four million words available in the several genres of writing going back more than thirty years. It gets rather cumbersome and complicated to count words when you write so many, in so many categories, kept in so many places, so this guesstimation will have to do for now. These words come from a Baha'i who pioneered in a critical stage of his Faith's growth and development eight months before the outset of the tenth and final stage of history.

This Cause grew nearly forty times from when I was born in 1944 and thirty times from the 200,000 believers that there were when my family first contacted the Cause in 1953 to the present six million adherents(approx), nearly half a century later.

I see this Web Page as a personal and a historic document that may be of use to future generations as this emerging world religion comes to occupy a significant place in the journey of humanity toward peace, unity and justice. Since it was impossible to publish the kind of material I have here; since Baha'i publishers had too many other publishing projects on their agendas, the Internet has come along at the right time. Relatively few people had Web Pages when my son, Daniel, helped me to construct my first Page back in 1997. Thousands, if not millions, of people and organizations can now be found with their own Web Pages.

I shall come back to this second draft, this second edition, of my Web Page and revise it from time to time in the years ahead. When the revisions are extensive enough a third edition will come into play. But for now I wish all my readers pleasure in travelling through the 42 sections of this document. It is my hope that some of those who come to this Web Page will find some useful perspectives and insights in relation to the Baha'i experience and my own in the half century 1953-2003 when the spiritual and administrative centre in Haifa saw the extensive developments that have only recently been completed. Beyond these fifty years I deal with some of the expanses and the horizons of the distant past and the distant future.

Ron Price

19 December 2002

PS For those who would like to CONTACT me by post my address is:

6 Reece Street

George Town

Tasmania 7250

In September 2002, after finishing my book on Roger White's poetry, my history of the Baha'i Faith in the Northern Territory: 1947-1997, several batches of poetry, a number of articles relating to the Cause and arranging my website locations, all writing projects which had occupied the first three years here in George Town Tasmania: 1999 to 2002, I began to take an anti-depressant drug. One of the effects of lithium which I began taking in 1980 for my bi-polar disorder or, perhaps, one of the effects of this bi-polar disorder which I began to experience in the earliest years of my pioneering, the early 1960s, has been to give me on a nightly basis what I can only describe as a 'death-wish.' It has not occurred every night for forty years, but it has certainly been a theme of my life, especially since about 1980. I have been on this anti-depressant drug for two weeks now and I realized while walking in the bush this morning that: this death-wish business has entirely disappeared. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 4 October 2002.

Such a weight it's been

these long and forty years.

It's as if I've come at last

to the Promised Land,

my Canaan where I can

lay my body down in peace,

into the soil of this fair land

of the Antipodes

where this divine melody,

this spirit of eternal life

will continue to harmonize

and shine like the morning star

as it has in these my days

with their joy and darkness.

With this darkness has come

some artistic faculty,

a richly inhabited and fertile country,

a perennial spring with running water,

a majestic river, magic,

evocation of the unseen,

snatching in disguise of words,

taken out of a native obscurity

vanishing phases of turbulence

into light where struggle can be seen

in permanence of memory.

For it seems I create

because I must interpret

humankind's experience

through my temperament

which will not leave me alone,

my precarious dominion,

my fleeting significance,

my circumstance and character

which finds its inspiration

from this multitude of forms.

Ron Price

4 October 2002

The person who lived in those first few houses, indeed any of the houses I have lived in, with the possible exception of the residence I have lived in since 1999, is not the person who has written this story, this autobiography. To look back on all that has been my life, the long and medium distances, is to know too much and too little: too much trivia and detail, too little of what is important. To look back is to reinterpret, to tell the story differently every time. Will a third edition of this account add anything useful? Would six editions, like Edward Gibbon's efforts in the late eighteenth century with his own autobiography, be a source of further enlightenment? My optimistic muse would like to think so, but I can't be sure. Even if, as Socrates once emphasized, 'the unexamined life is not worth living' or, as someone else I once read said: the unexamined life is meaningless, the process of analysis is endless.

The "I" is a shimmering multitude, a multiple, a memory-filled entity that expands in many directions. The facts, the events, of my life become more difficult to define, to describe, to play with like the coloured billiard balls they once seemed to be. They don't bounce around the sides of my life and into their pockets with quite the precision that they once seemed to do. If 'reality' is those events and those facts, those discrete billiard balls, they seem to have become something to hide behind, something to call my life, some historical facticity that superficially tidies up what ultimately I can not tidy. My private life leaves, as Australian writer Judith Wright put it, "less trace than the silver trail of a slug which dries and blows away."¹

In the world of the spirit, though, as Baha'u'llah once wrote, "the scattering angels of the Almighty shall scatter abroad the fragrance of the words uttered" by my mouth and "shall cause the heart of every righteous man to throb." There seems to be much more going on in that private world than the conscious mind is aware of. "Life is but a show, vain and empty," Baha'u'llah also states, "bearing the mere semblance of reality." It is not surprising, therefore, if my backward gaze through my days leaves me with the feeling, somewhat, that my life is like "a vapour in the desert," something I hope to be water but, on facing it squarely, it is but "mere illusion."

With a succession of personas that I have had, with a string of achievements and failures, obsessions and relationships, preoccupations and rejections, choices and changes, I can and have described my life. I have looked back through the tunnel of identity at my childhood and, indeed, at all the other stages of my life and my experience in the Baha'i community and what I look back at has vanished. What I have recorded is a succession of changes. What I was has changed as I have become something else. As Wright puts it in the last lines of the closing poem in her autobiography:

A ripple goes across the glass.

The faces break and blur and pass

as love and time are blurred together.²

But then, I pause and think, this life, my life, inaugurates the history of a divine-human relationship that has only just begun to unfold. I have little comprehension of the nature of this relationship or of my destiny here at the beginning of a long road. I have responded to a call to pioneer and journied to many places over forty years. The story, the narrative, has taken many unexpected turns. It is in this narrative, and in the greater epic narrative that is the history of this new Cause, that I have come to find the meaning and purpose of my life. I have tried, in these early years, the first half century, of the Kingdom of God on earth,³ to play a small part in bringing heaven down to this earth, to transfigure the world. My story is not over yet. The task is immense and there is work enough for everyone in this new century, this new millennium.

I am conscious, as Mark Twain noted, that the autobiographer "has the most earnest desire to make himself out to be a better man in every little business than has been to his discredit."⁴ We are not obliged, even in autobiography, to acknowledge our wrongs, our faults, our sins, to the nth degree. Much of my dirty laundry I have simply left out, not so much to manage the impressions but for the same reason or reasons I would leave it out in a personal relationship. It is an issue of taste and preference, of appropriateness. Not everything that a man knoweth can be disclosed. I think it was the Imam Ali that first noted this truth and expressed it this way.

More importantly, what my autobiographical work does reveal and describe, often obliquely and unintentionally, often not so, are the social and symbolic structures underlying my life. These are, quintessentially, those of the Baha'i Faith in the ninth and early decades of the tenth stage of Baha'i history: 1953-1963 and 1963-2001. If there are omissions, distortions, discrepancies or disturbances in my account, the remembered past which I have put on paper, they, too, are revealing and symptomatic. But I leave it to future historians and students of the social sciences to deal with their significances, to analyse their implications. For now, in these essays, interviews and poems, I provide an autobiographical hermeneutic, a self-reflective history. I am a historical being who has made history, studied history and here, in these reflections, provided a body of reference for the future.⁵

Enquiring into life histories has been part of the standard research methods of the social sciences since the 1920s, since the time the Guardian began to design, to construct, the Baha'i Administrative system. A life history, my life history, is neither a unique document nor a representative of a group, in this case the Baha'i community. I like to see this entire oeuvre as "the product of a social individual," "the manifestation of an ensemble of social relations," as part of "the prism of history which encompasses the universal in the particular."⁶

"The key to selfhood," wrote Philip Weinstein in his analysis of American writer William Faulkner, "is the selective language we use to articulate our inner selves." And this, he goes on, is determined by our voluntary and involuntary affiliations with larger groups. Our very sense of self emerges from this charged field of utterance and service. There is a clear cultural encapsulation of personality and, for me, a significant part of this cultural guise, cultural determinant, is the religion I first came to associate myself with, partly voluntarily, partly involuntarily, partly the product of socialization influences and socio-historical circumstances as that association was, back in 1953.

What I am trying to do in this essay and in most of my writing is to give coherence and intelligibility to the great mass of experience and thought that is my life. I draw extensively on a concept of history at the centre of my Faith. This writing may provide, for some, one of a host of possible entry points for a study of several epochs of Baha'i history, one of many ways of weaving the collective and the individual into one mobile and effusive process. It is often said that a biographer's chief task is to prevent the historian from commiting the error of oversimplification and omission. I think one way of defining the autobiographer's task is to say that it gives both the historian and the biographer a piece of solid ground to start from. Perhaps this website is just that: a piece of solid ground.

One thing that does emerge in all this writing, one piece of solid ground from which to fly into the sky to put it metaphorically, is a person fascinated with his cultural identity rooted in his religion. It is a fascination to the point of obsession. It is a powerful preoccupation from which everything is born, which gives the bird flight. Although I like to think I am at home anywhere, perhaps my real home is those moments in time when I am writing for it helps make me more aware of myself and the world. This, wrote W.H. Auden, is the function of poetry. Writing poetry also provides a sense of real home because it also provides a sense of consolation.

Certainly the kind of biography and autobiography that Virginia Woolf wrote about in 1937 in her essay 'Reflections at Sheffield Place,' is what can be found here. Freed from the tedious parade through dates and battles, tests and difficulties, a story with a beginning, middle and end, a life-sequence packed with detail from birth to death and a forest of family trees, this multi-genred literary product has some of that riot and confusion which Woolf advocated, some of the passion and humour. My aim is to create the groundswell for a closeness between the writer writing, the reader reading and the subject. This is no information-retrieval exercise. This is something that has taken root in my emotions and my imagination and has grown into knowledge. This is, as Michael Holroyd put it so accurately, the evidence of a type of rebirth.⁷ I try to bring together my many selves, a complex and fascinating society and a religion which has obsessed me for over four decades.

For many years when I was a teacher I compiled reading material for my students around an eclectic mix of book chapters, journal articles, historical documents, extracts from literary texts, journalism, inter alia. Now, in this autobiographical work, I have followed a similar pattern but put a pot pourri of material into one work. I give to readers a single-authored, multidisciplinary sourcebook in the field of autobiography.

You will find here in the following part of this work an epilogue and some thoughts on letter writing, on history, poetry and essays--some of the genres I have used in this work. I will say no more in this introduction to the epilogue other than to leave you with a prose-poem I wrote at the age of 56, a year after I arrived in Tasmania to begin my retirement and a daily-life devoted to writing.

A MIND LIVELY AND AT EASE

It is said that an artist’s work is the sum total of his experience. The artist does not create from a tabula rasa, but from a rich menu of specific and unspecific experience, grey and vague and highly and variously coloured. The artist drafts his own destiny as he drafts his music, his art, his sculpture or his poetry, at least in part. And he is never sure, as Stephen Spender puts it, however confident he may be, whether he has misdirected his energy, or whether his poetry is insignificant and irrelevant or great and important. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, 8 August 2000.

A mind lively and at ease

is a gift of fortune

and gives meaning and value

to perceived experience,¹

to the deep and rich

satisfaction of my own writing

and to the slow charting of the

progress toward our destiny.

The unperturbed mind

is quickest and can deal

with the vanity of vanities, life,

which we must both accept and

reject, which pierces us with its

nonsense and its strange relations.

Cultural geography is concerned with those aspects of land and space, in both the micro and the macro sense, that shape people's ideas about themselves, and give to their identities a characteristic expression. Landscape is really an all-embracing concept. It includes virtually everything around us and has manifest significance for everyone. This sub-section of geography, the cultural sphere, formulates the complex strategies of identification that function in the name of a people and a nation. It is here that the recollection, the sense, of home and belonging are constructed and create an imagined and/or a real community. There results from this study of land and space a collectiveness that is addressed in different ways by different peoples, that is part of their identity and that structures belonging. I have mentioned this from time to time in this autobiography, but it has not occupied much of my attention. This is probably due to the many places I have lived rather than one which has helped to form my identity.

This whole question of the sense of identity has been part and parcel of the western literary tradition going right back to Homer and the Old Testament writers. Early poetry of the eighth century BCE, Hesiod, Homer and the tradition they belonged to, has as a major theme of the identity of the Greek people, whether united in a military expedition as in the Iliad or as a geographical system in the Catalogue of Ships. My poetry and my autobiography is concerned, too, with the notion of identity, the identity of the Baha’i community and my own identity both within that community and without. It is this aspect of my identity that I give more of my attention to in this work.

The decision to pioneer internationally in 1971, to go abroad as we used to say, a decision I made with my first wife or, more honestly, because of my first wife, after graduating from college in 1967 and teaching for three years, represented an embrace of the challenges and pleasures of the unfamiliar. This reorientation was also a form of disorientation due to the new that flooded in from all sides and pulled old assumptions off their moorings. Just as a compelling theory may force students to fall back on what they know, only to find that the theory has changed the way in which they considered this knowledge, so the experience of living on a foreign continent makes one look homeward and realize that home will never be the same.

The lesson I have learned during my 35 years as an expatriate is perhaps best described as a semantic one: home, Canada, and North America ceased forever to be synonyms in my mind. Even if home still lies "over there," certain signs of it greet the eyes of Canadians abroad no matter where we go. Unlike the USA which, more than any other country, extends beyond its borders with its extensive global permutations and permeations reshaping foreign economic, political, and social, not to mention imaginative landscapes—all in the image of America, Canada remains snowlocked in a bleak and lonely landscape and, even in our more media-saturated world, the country still lies somewhat remote and isolated, clean and distant.

The more I have travelled, the more I have learned, the more I have come to realize that, should I return after having departed home, home and homeland, the objects of my patriotic projections, cares little for me or my loyalty. The idea, then, that I belong to a place, and that that place in turn belongs to me, merely exposes me to disappointment, and conditions me to contest for and die over a fiction, which, by its very nature, denies and defies belonging.

The Canadian or the American abroad--and certainly me in Australia--sees that the foreign landscapes where he dwells are not just mirror images of home. Some landscapes are, of course, familiar in some ways, and some are not. In a globalizing world our experience of contemporary reality is fused with the dreams, fantasies, and satellite image-fed visions of everyone and everything from the original European colonizers in our homeland, to a set of explorers like Lewis and Clark or Cartier and Cabot, to Somali refugees, to the likes of al-Qaeda. These ideas that traditionally existed behind quite clear borders have been in this era of mass communication, mixed into one big pot. To put this a little differently: the world has become one country.

Canada became, particularly in this global age, something that was neither simply a place, nor as a permanent set of values, beliefs, attitudes, or philosophies. It was, it became, an idea, one that was fluid and open to constant change and not defined by traditional constraints like geography, politics, and nationality. My personal experience, however, showed me that thinking of Canada in these terms as I did, was neither simple nor easy. It was easier said than done and, if done as I had done now for over 30 years, it was not easy to put into words. This was true not only of my Canadianness but of my pioneeringness and much else.

"The art of autobiography has many facets. One of the critical facets is omission. One's own forgetfulness is very important. Indeed, as I have pointed out elsewhere, most of my life is simply not here. It has been omitted in the interest of interest. As in the daily round one can only bring to memory a certain portion of one’s experience, otherwise one would literally drown in data, in memories, in a chaos of facticity. As the world passed through the golden age of astronomy during these epochs, as it advanced through a range of new technologies from the computer to satellite, from radio to TV, video to DVD, inter alia, as it doubled its population from 3 to 6 billion, so much was invented and developed, so much impacted on man and society-but I have omitted the discussion of these and so many other facets of the industrial and commercial developments of our time. I belonged to the first generation born into a world in which television had been invented, but not yet popularized.

Claude Simon, in the lecture he gave when given the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1985, said, "I find that what one writes or describes is never something which has happened prior to the work of writing. On the contrary the writing produces something in every sense of the term in the course of working." The writing, Simon argues, produces something within its own present. I find this to be my own experience as well. This work has returned unremittingly to decisive and not so decisive events in my life. I have created a seam of light, of gold, of joy, that has had its source, its origins in the Baha’i Faith. With fire my gold has been tested and life’s gold in its many forms has tested this servant again and again. Many of life’s tests I did not pass. But like a close cricket series, I won’t know the score or, indeed, if I won, until the last ball is played and the series has ended. Indeed, I’m not so sure the cricket metaphor about winning even applies here because so often in life the first shall be last and the last first. The act of writing for me is more of an effort of understanding. My aim is to be clear and evocative for in this way I feel more in touch with my subject.

After my years of early childhood, I enjoyed life as a student for some twenty years; for many years I enjoyed teaching, perhaps as many as thirty. I don’t think I was a natural teacher, but I grew into it. After several years I became successful; I became a person enjoyed by my students and enjoying them. I loved to explain things and rarely made a questioner feel stupid for asking. Although I had broad intellectual interests, my pursuit of career and my involvement in the Baha’i Faith left little time for other activities: I did not play golf or follow sports after the age of 21; I did not take up painting or cooking or photography or anything one could call a hobby, although I did collect stamps in my teens; I watched little TV, had no TV from 1956 to 1976, although after I retired I watched over two hours a day; I rarely went to movies, to various forms of entertainment or ate out. I did sing a little and played the guitar; I joined the Baha’i Faith with its world of meetings and outings and I went for a daily walk of about half an hour among a host of other domestic, familial and social activities that are part of the lives of fathers and husbands in the west.

I think it highly unlikely that aspects of my life would become legendary as did the lives of many a celebrity in my time. No series of iconographic images evoked from fact and fiction would ever produce a celluloid dream as has been produced for many a culture hero of these four epochs. There would be no fantastical caricature of my life with its inevitable exaggerations, bright colours and haunting themes and images created for the world of cinema and a mass audience. Mementos and mis-remembering, pride and prejudices, would never be mixed together and served up as legend to hungry fans in this or ensuing centuries. Every year hundreds, perhaps thousands, of visitors would never flock to some of the locales where I have lived. No one would ever have to locate or re-locate my legend in some tangled interweaving of history, myth and memories. For the millions and billions of people in this and future centuries whose names, whose lives and memories would be excluded from history, would not be pulled into some timeless world of myth and dream, legend and narrative associated with the places I have lived, my places of memory and my life’s experiences.

More generally, will a myth of our time be created, as is so often the case with any and every age,a myth with its myriad of elements, with its enormous disparity between conception and reality? Will that myth spawn an immense literature as is happening to all the ages of the past? The concern of a future time will not be with the reality of our time, the time of these four epochs, but with what people have thought and felt about that reality. This thinking, feeling and remembering will undoubtedly contribute to the myth. Myth is the stuff of the history of sensibility. One critic of contemporary Hollywood myth expressed the view that "If you can find the myth, it hasn't been hidden properly, and if it's been hidden properly, you can't find it for sure." My life has been so much wrapped up with the Baha’i myth and I think I have hidden it in this long work. I have hidden it so well that the average reader will have little idea of what it is. There is some truth in this cryptic comment by this Hollywood critic.

There is, of course, myth and myth. Some students of autobiography, as I have mentioned earlier, regard self-authorship as a myth arising out of modern individualism and the increasingly narcissistic nature of modern Western society. It is the view of some of these analysts of autobiography that individuals are only the narrators, not the authors, of their life story. Martin Heidegger, in a book published at the very start of my pioneering journey, Being and Time, said we have two possibilities as we go through our lives. We can be the author of our own story or we can traverse life according to a script composed by others. I like to think we can do both. Scholarship by Baha’is on autobiography from within their community is in its infancy. Indeed, it has hardly got off the ground. When this work is subjected to students of this genre, I will be interested to see the results. By then, I am inclined to think, I will have left this mortal coil.

After countless debates and exhaustive deconstructions about my time and my age which are sure to take place in the future, it will be hard to tell what is left. A lot of talking tends to produce the experience of intellectual exhaustion. Certain images will endure for some people and define the age, the time. That imagery may be contested, may be transcendent, may be bewildering, unbending, and even beguiling. For others it will be text, print, that defines an age, a time, a person, a problem—not images. For still others it will be a combination and still others no images and no text will define the item of concern because the subject at issue will not concern them in the slightest. We can’t all be concerned about the same stuff. The peculiar and compelling image, the subtle and complex text, will prod a future age to re-examine the fascinating crossroads of myth and memory. They will beckon a revisiting, yet again, of another day.

My second wife often complained, although grew to accept, that I devoted insufficient time to my marriage and to shared activity together. In my retirement this changed a little—for the positive—as we came to spend three or four hours together every day. It is perhaps a matter of personal taste whether one attributes my drive first as a student, then as a teacher and finally as a writer and as a Baha’i to personal ego or a genuine commitment to my various roles, roles to learn, to educate and inspire people about learning and to serve the Cause and my writing. Undoubtedly there were elements of all these motivations present at different stages of my life-span. Retirement also brought a greater element of control over my life. Parents, teachers, employers and students had a great deal to say about my life until about the age of sixty. Then the only person I had to please to any significant extent was my wife and, by the age of sixty, I had that worked out, if not entirely to her satisfaction, at least enough to provide the basis for a household harmony and tranquillity so that I could get on with what had become the passion of my life—writing.

I once thought that autobiography meant being able to write without artifice, but I’d like to think any thoughtful observer of this writer will see a certain cunning, game, play, everywhere. That is what I’d like to think. The geography of my book circles and doubles with long footnotes to take the spread of thought. Why footnotes? As Martin Amis writes in his autobiography that footnotes "preserve the collateral thought." In fact, the whole thing is a lattice of collateral." Like Amis, too, I must confess to having compiled this work with one eye on a remote and exacting audience: posterity. And if not the whole eye, then part of the eye, perhaps the retina or the aqueous humour or the eye brows. But at least the job got done before the body gave way, as the philosopher Paul Feyerband’s did. He became paralyzed and had to finish his autobiography from an unfortunate bed-ridden state. Other writers become paralysed with the thought of using the first person: a serious dilemma for an autobiographer. I, too, was reticent to use the first person for the first two decades as I toyed initially with this autobiography. But eventually I found a voice, a voice I was comfortable with. I also found a format that attempted to create what I think is a happy balance between the routine and the banal on the one hand and aphoristic nuggets and sustained analysis on the other. I leave it to readers to assess whether I achieved this balance.

The profession of writer has recently acquired something of the roles of travelling salesman and repertory actor. As I gaze back over the half a century(1949-1999) before I took up writing full time I feel as if I acquired or took part in these roles through the mediums of several spheres of major activity: student, teacher, Bahá'í pioneer and a multitude of geographic, status, career, employment, community and marital situations. Full time writers are often engaged in an endless succession of book festivals and literary conferences which take them round the globe, all of which adds to an air of unreality and stimulus, with books alone being the hub around which their existence revolves. I, too, went around the globe, or at least from one end in the north to the other end in the south, with books being a critical hub of my life. Book festivals were for me programs on the radio.

If I experienced any unreality it was due to a range of factors but attending literary conferences and book festivals was not among those factors. From time to time and partly due to my bi-polar disability I experienced that unspeakable penalty or affliction in which I felt that my whole being had been exerted toward accomplishing nothing. But, insensibly and as the decades wore on, I knew that this feeling, when and if it arose, was transient and that in a few hours at most it would disappear.

As my early sixties advanced from year to year I withdrew increasingly, almost entirely, from the society of those about me and gave myself up to a wondrous study of writing and reading. In many ways, my reading in the first six decades of my life was far from as deep as I would have liked it to be but there was so much else going on in my life that I was unable to achieve the depth that I wanted. With the early years of late adulthood I have been able to both read and write more, much more, at last to my satisfaction. I am conscious of William Hazlitt’s cautionary note that often, if one reads more, one thinks less. Perhaps that notion just provided me with an easy way to excuse myself. I find that concentrated and extensive reading seems to come second to writing and the innumerable odds-and-ends of life. It is true for me, as it was for Hazlitt, that I try most earnestly to cultivate the habit of thinking. I detest nothing so much as servile imitation, affectation and their loathsome odour. I can feel that creep when it comes into my writing and, wishing to think and feel for myself, I try to stamp it out. If I have not drunk deep, hopefully I have at least been an expert taster who makes serendipitous connections.

This reading and writing does not take place in a vaccuum. I continue my role of activist, but I play the role differently than I did in the first forty years of my adult life. As someone who surmounted the educational hurdles that kept previous generations in my family solidly working class, I became a credentialed worker, a professional who experienced considerable autonomy and intrinsic worker satisfaction from the 1960s to the 1990s. And now that paid-labour of the day does not occupy me as it did for decades, nor does raising a family, nor going to meetings and engaging so frequently in social and community activities, I can write and place the products of my efforts at thousands of internet sites with literally millions of my words. Although a critical observer might see and say that I was simply blowing my own horn, I was blowing the Baha’i horn, so to speak. This occupied me virtually all my waking hours.

There were many who blew the horn that I blew, albeit differently shaped, different sizes and styles, but many ordinary people and many thinkers and intellectuals, writers and social scientists blew many of the tunes I was trying to blow both in my autobiography and in other works. Fernand Braudel, for example, of the French annales school, recognised the justice of the sociologist Raymond Aron's observation that 'the phase of civilisations is coming to an end, and for good or ill humanity is embarking on a new phase.' That phase is one of a single civilisation which could become universal. I don’t want to list and comment, quote and analyse, all those who share this global, one world perspective. Suffice it to say, it was a horn which as the epochs advanced was blown by more and more serious students of history’s longue duree. Some of these students had a grand interpretation of history, a meganarrative, along the lines pursued by Oswald Spengler, H. G. Wells or Arnold Toynbee. And some did not. Much of the discussion remains nebulous and unsatisfactory. The story, the blowing, is far from over.

My years of worrying about the success of my three children and whether they too would enjoy the benefits of education in their professional lives that I enjoyed; whether they were happy in their single or married lives and whether my step-grandchildren were winning their races or successful at school, were for the most part over by the time I entered my early sixties. My wife tended to take care of the worry department in these areas and she did a better job of providing care, therapy and advice when needed. The messages of conformity and obedience, of working hard to achieve occupational achievement and self-satisfaction, seemed to be more of a pattern in my children’s lives and the lives of my grandchildren for that matter, than it was in mine forty years before. Although all was not smooth in their lives, they did not give me much to worry about as they went on with their lives as busy as beavers. This subject could occupy many more pages and perhaps it will in some future revised edition of this autobiography, for the members of my immediate family each have their own story and, when looked at in detail, is as long as your proverbial arm.

I should add here, parenthetically, that I, too, worked hard. Perhaps such a remark goes without saying; perhaps my inner drive was due partly to my insecurities and my knowing that my achievements never came easily. Perhaps my relentless pursuit of the high goals I set myself was part of my bi-polar disorder. Perhaps the origins of my ambitious tendency were to be found in my early childhood and my relationships with hard working parents and a conscientious family in general. Perhaps a detailed explanation of the Price and Cornfield family fortunes over time, over previous generations might uncover some explanation for the ardour and effort that characterized my life.

The foundation of the two family-trees, Price and Cornfield, going back centuries is virtually unknown to me. In the last quarter of the 19^th century, though, each family occupied the upper regions of the lower class or the lower regions of the middle class. The recounting of the ups and downs of the generations in these two families, generations I have known something about, is beyond the scope of my knowledge or the purposes of this autobiography as I have come to conceive it. The canvas I paint is broad but it is, for the most part, rooted in subjects I know a good deal about. Readers will find some discussion of my family tree in this autobiography but, on the whole, very little outside those members I actually met and got to know well.

"History," wrote the historian R.G. Collingwood, "is the science of res gestae" and res gestae are the actions of human beings, actions that have been done in the past. The first time in the western tradition that we come across this term res gentae is with the emperor Augustus in 14 AD. It is inscribed on his mausoleum. It is a memorial of his achievements. It is a type of official, abbreviated autobiography.

Autobiography, then, to follow Collingwood’s lead, is my own actions in the past. "History," Collingwood went on, "is for human self-knowledge. Knowing yourself means knowing what you can do; and since nobody knows what he can do until he tries, the only clue to what man can do is what man has done. The value of history, then, is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is." "All history is the history of thought," Collingwood continues, "in so far as human actions are mere events, the historian cannot understand them; strictly, he cannot even ascertain that they have happened. They are only knowable to him as the outward expression of inward thoughts." All this is certainly true, a fortiori, of autobiography.

The history of my thought and action is the re-enactment of that past thought and action in my own mind. My autobiography is a continuous process of interaction between myself and the facts of my life, an unending dialogue between my present and my past. I am, in the words of another historian E.H. Carr, just another dim figure trudging along, but the point at which I find myself in this trudging procession determines my angle of vision and just how dim or how sharp that vision is over the past. In addition, as autobiographer, I am not dredging up everything only what I see as relevant. A good many people simply want to know about the past, my past and my view of things for the emotional or intellectual satisfaction I might provide. The line between comment and opinion is increasingly becoming blurred in newspapers and in the electronic media. Often, the fewer the facts the stronger the opinions. About my life, I have all too many facts and, as I get older, the diversity of opinion I bring to my life, my society and my religion, I find requires the use of outside authorities and experts to provide balance, some fact-checking, some external perspective.

The extent to which an autobiographer fulfils the useful social function of helping people know something better, to that extent does he contribute to the complex of non-practical activities which make up the culture of a society. When and if I stimulate and satisfy the imagination of my readers, I do not differ essentially from the poet or artist. There is an emotional satisfaction of a high order to be gained from extending the comprehending intelligence of people to include elements of the past. Like all rational activities, the study, the reading, of a well written autobiography, an autonomous enterprise and activity in itself, can contribute to the improvement of man. It does so by seeking the truth within the confines of its particular province and that province is the rational reconstruction of the past.

I do not want to dwell excessively on the middle class psychology, either in its individual or collective expression, that played in the centre and at the fringes of my life as an adult since the mid-sixties. Nor do I want to place here a political analysis, an analysis that took society from a politics of the left in the sixties and seventies and then to the right in the following twenty years. Even though my adult life was lived with this psychological and political background, I feel I have alluded to these themes enough in the previous mountain of words. I have drawn here on one of the better analyses of my culture and my class, my status group and its values and beliefs, an analysis that was first published in 1989, just as I was about to complete my last decade of professional employment as a teacher.

Like Gustave Flaubert, the originator of the modern novel who spent much of his life in one house and a great deal of that time in one room I, too, spend much of my time now in a room in a house in the oldest town in Australia at the end of the Tamar River in northern Tasmania. Only the occasional Baha’i activity, family interchange, conversation with a friend, daily interaction with my wife and the inevitable trips to town to shop, to put up posters and to go the library and attend to the several domestic activities that are part of life for everyman took me into the social domain. I had come to see life more as an affair of solitude diversified by company than an affair of company diversified by solitude. For fifty years(1954-2004) it had been the other way around.

With early retirement the tables and the millennium had slowly been turning. As they turned I slowly approached the heartland of my story across the familiar slopes of my earthly life, its actions and thoughts. I tell my story in a way which gives me an invigorating sense of briskness and phrase-relishing. As the epochs advanced I had an increasing and an insatiable spirit of activity. By the fifth epoch the spirit was channeled virtually in its entirety into a sedentary and literary life. In the process I defined my world. I hope readers enjoy my definition and the way I go about putting it together. Like Johnson’s dictionary 250 years ago, it is an ambitious work. But whether it will influence generations as Johnson’s work did, I can only hope. He wrote to escape the pain of life; I wrote to escape society’s endless chat with which I had grown fatigued and to write which was my pleasure.

I write, too, because of life’s very familiarity which one writer called life’s ‘soul fat.’ Familiarity insulates and cushions, dockets the uncanny, translates every tomorrow into a rerun of yesterday. It is an anodyne not be be scorned, but to be appreciated because it helps us negotiate our world through the hostile and the unexpected. Familiarity populates our world with hints of habituation, reassures us with bulletins about the déjà vu and the deja vecu, resists novelty with patterns and conventions that both predate and outlive us. This autobiography is an extended raid on the familiar in order to make it unfamiliar, renewed, fresh. In this I only partly succeed. For being cushioned and insulated from reality by familiarity’s layering of fat has its comforts and gives life a certain ease amidst the reruns. I try not to promise more than I deliver as I survey this territory of the familair and in promising little perhaps, hopefully, I will deliver more.

An autobiography, like a novel, stands between us and the hardening concept of statistical man. "There is no other medium," said William Golding when he received his Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983, "in which we can live for so long and so intimately with a character." That is the service both an autobiography and a novel renders. Golding went on to say: "It performs no less an act than the rescue and the preservation of the individuality and dignity of the single being, be it man, woman or child. No other art, I claim, can so thread in and out of a single mind and body--and so live another life. It does ensure that at the very least a human being shall be seen to be more than just one billionth of one billion.." And if the potential reader is not interested in what I have preserved here he need not read my work, need not pick it up. He is free to stop at any juncture. I hope that this work is not just a humdrum inventory of personal recollections that attempt to encourage the disinclined reader. I hope, too, that it is not just a series of casually scanned or, like Flaubert’s novels, savagely chosen details in a frozen gel of chosenness. " Pioneering Over Four Epochs is a portmanteau of personal history, the Bahá'í Faith and endless opinionizing; it is a pinata of literary references and a galimaufery of stuff that I try to beat into shape with the stick in/of my brain--sometimes successfully, sometimes not.

The Cause is going to need pioneers for many generations to come. As I have been writing this lengthy statement of my pioneering experience I have often felt that my story is but one of the first to make it onto paper from the generations beginning in 1937. Some narratives, some genres, like westerns and gangster stories, are dead or are dieing out. The political agenda changes with the seasons, although some problems seem to be perennial. My father used to say "there is always trouble in the Middle East." When the news came on and he was in his latter years, he would leave the room muttering about the endless warfare in Israel. That was in 1960. Nearly fifty years later the story is the same. And the historian AJP Taylor said it was wisest never to have an opinion about the Middle East. The pioneer, in its many forms, has a long life ahead of it and a long life behind it. Opinions about the pioneer, in some ways, have just begun.

Since literature takes as its subject all human experience, and particularly the ordering, interpreting, and articulating of experience, it is no accident that the most varied literary projects find instruction in the great mass of literature and its history and that the results of these projects are relevant to thinking about literature. What is true for literature, is also true for the other arts, such as painting and film and—autobiography. Within this great mass of literature, metaphor always plays a crucial role in autobiographical self-recognition and self-creation since it provides a ready means of perceiving order in an otherwise inchoate experience. The voyage paradigm or metaphor is used time and again in the history of western autobiography. At the close of the only Latin novel to survive, the poet Apuleius writes: "You have endured and performed many labours and withstood the buffetings of all the winds of ill luck. Now at last you have put into the harbour of peace.... Neither your noble blood and rank nor your education sufficed to keep you from falling a slave to pleasure.... But blind fortune, after tossing you maliciously about from peril to peril has somehow . . . landed you here in religious felicity."

This work of nearly 2000 years ago could very well apply to me and my life, at least in some major dimensions before I, too, landed in a region of religious felicity. The metaphor of journey as travelled by others has its applications to my trip as well.

The reader should also keep in mind as he reads this work that there is what autobiographers calls the interstitial self—the self that emerges in life’s multitude of interstices, some in discourse, others in private. Sometimes this interstitial self emerges only for a moment to deal with and negotiate a conflict, a particular point in a relationship, indeed, many of life’s especial situations. Sometimes the person is unaware of some of his interstitial selves. He is drawn back into familiar territory where there is a more stable position, a more familiar self and his interstitial self disappears as fast as it came into being. At other times, this interstitial self is grasped as a way to escape the restrictive discourses that so often arise in social life. In addition to this interstitial self there is another conventional autobiographical term, the hybrid self. This is a self that can be seen as shifting among positions and discourses, sometimes combining them into a true hybrid. At other times I am very aware of the contradictions and contradictory situations in life and that I must maintain quite separate and independent discourses, languages, so to speak, of the self. Then there is the unfound self, a self that seems unfindable. It took me 19 years(1984-2003) to finally find a voice that spoke to me of me so that I could write this autobiography in a satisfactory way. Beginnings are often difficult for novelists and autobiographers. People think of writing their story or some story for years but may, in the end, never pick up their pen. I shall say no more on what can be a complex subject, the subject of selves. But it is an important aspect for readers to consider as they delve into this autobiography.

Readers need to keep in mind G.K. Chesterton’s turn of phrase in his discussion of the future of Charles Dickens’ writings. Chesterton notes that there are a number of important factors which ensure the immortality of a man. "The chief of them," he adds, "is the unquestionable fact that if they write an enormous amount of bad work they are well on the way to immortality." This may lead a man to being put below his place in his own time, but it does not affect his permanent place, to all appearance, at all. Shakespeare, for instance, and Wordsworth wrote not only an enormous amount of bad work, but an enormous amount of enormously bad work." Some of the feedback I have received in the three years since I finished the 3^rd edition of this work would indicate that what I have written is just that, an enormously bad work. So, perhaps, my immortality is assured, at least if Chesterton is onto something here.

Chesterton goes on to say in his discussion of the future of Dickens’ writings that it is the very exaggeration of his characters that will immortalize him. The realistic narrators of their time are all forgotten, but the exaggerators live on. Chesterton sites the example of Homer and his characters in the Iliad and Odyssey. I might add the example of the Bab and Baha’u’llah’s writings which to a western ear and the moderate tones of the stiff upper-lip of the English literary tradition, often seem exaggerated. My own work, sadly, aiming as it does for realism, factual detail and accuracy of circumstance, will probably pass through the wings of time and be no more substance than the eye of a dead ant as the Bab, or was it Baha’u’llah, wrote. I have not sufficiently exaggerated my story.

Chesterton has left me with some hope for a place in posterity’s literary home. Chesterton also felt that those writers with a poetic inclination had a greater future than those without. So, perhaps, in the end, my poetry will save a place for me in the rooms of the future amidst their lush or not-so-lush furnishings. Among these furnishings, perhaps on the walls, will be the carefully arranged portraits of my emotional credentials, my intellectual and psychological interests, indeed, a whole gallery of stuff. It is difficult to see what value all these gallery pieces will have but their association with a new Faith which claims to be the emerging religion on this planet will give them a significance I can scarcely appreciate at this early hour.

A person is not simply determined and dominated by the pressures of any overarching discourse or ideology such as the secular pluralism in which we as citizens of western democracies are immersed. We are all, I believe, the agents of our own personal discernment capable of identifying and interpreting society’s dominant discourse in order to insert ourselves into it or confront and resist it. The dominant cultural forces within our world do not take away our free will--entirely. But just as Darwinism and the Civil War shattered the psyches of Americans living in the last 40 years of the nineteenth century(1863-1903) and two great wars and the holocaust(1914-1945) shattered the psyches of those living in the twentieth century. We in the last half of the 20^th century and the early 21st have all of this shattering of the social and psychological ethos of our times behind us and an entirely new crop of traumas to add their bewildering and deranging affects.

There cannot be any doubt at all that my own literary corpus can not be appreciated apart from the influences of my age. In an attempt to sketch the course of my literary endeavours it would be futile to detach their succession from the experiences of my personal life, largely determined, as they were, by the revolutionary changes of my time, by other changes in the condition of both Canada and Australia where I have lived, developments in the religion I have been associated with and in the various intellectual shifts and alterations in the multitude of centres around the world.

The probing of 'Canadianness' or ‘Australianness’ turns out to be a puzzling and somewhat brain-racking exercise in my pioneer situation. But all is not puzzle and probe for the brain. Much of the contemplation is enriching and interesting for the psyche. In the end, too, there is a balance between this national identification and a local as well as an international level of experience and analysis.

The world I have grown up in, at least since Norman Vincent Peale wrote what was arguably the first modern self-help book in 1937, has grown accustomed to the standard victim-recovery cycle of modern self-help books. Part of pop-psychology, one of the many substitutes for religion in my time, the self-help genre can not be found in the text of this book. Like Proust's masterpiece, I like to think my work is edifying precisely because my struggle goes on and on and just changes its form as the years go on. Unlike Proust, I do get better from the illnesses that dot my life. I may not get totally cured; the battle of life may change its form and conten; I often blame or am tempted to blame others for my problems; I do not welcome suffering, as Proust seems to do, as an opportunity for thinking up fresh ideas and for entering into a richer relationship with experience. But once it has come and gone I welcome the insights that come in its train.

An interesting question that Erich Fromm raises in his book The Art of Listening(1994) has to do with what we regard as the maximum of suffering which is in each of us; or as William James put it in his Varieties of Religion Experience(1900) what are the limits of our sacrifical propensities. At the age of 62 I do not know, but I am aware that my capacity has been approached in recent years. I know to a significant extent what I can and can not do; I can see the edge approaching but, unless I have some advance warning, I still fall off. Having reached my limit, I still plunge into the abyss if I take too much on. Too much now is quite easily defined as too much social interaction.

I like to think too that if any of this memoir is some form of self-help, I am offering it in the form of a manual, a philosophical guide for the intelligent person. If self-help there be here, I hope it is a welcome departure from the usual bellyaching, angsting and endless expressions of concern. ''Our best chance of contentment,'' Proust writes ''lies in taking up the wisdom offered to us in coded form through our coughs, allergies, social gaffes and emotional betrayals. If we can also avoid the ingratitude of those who blame the peas, the bores, the time and the weather, then some degree of contentment may be ours.'' Following the inevitable nine, seven or five steps of those self-help books may also help, I say with tongue in cheek.

For some, especially writers, language itself is the primary arena within which the shattering experiences of life are coped with and the individual assertivenss and agency becomes manifest from behind the angst. For writers talk is more important than action, indeed talk itself is action because words determine thoughts and actions. "Language... is the parent, and not the child, of thought.... Men are the slaves of words." This may have been true of the philosopher Kant whom posterity caricatured as a man "who was all thought and no life" or "a man who neither had a life nor a history." I’ve come to the view that thought and action, two of the major facets of our lives, can not be separated. The practical and the mystic have become one in our day.

My journey is not only the core and central thread of my life story; it is also the recurrent and most enduring principle of my life. Nowhere, throughout the narrative, will one encounter a complacently ensconced pioneer. I have been a migratory and volatile spirit which has sprung out of the most established and rooted position in a conservative Canadian consciousness. I have often been beaten down by circumstances, depressed by body chemistry and situations, called by that curious combination of sorrow and a strange desolation of hope into a quietness, but complacency has not been a quality I have battled with—although I must say that complacency sounds restful and not unattractive after some of life’s other battles I have had to contend with.

My resistance to the dominant mores of my time has been articulated, made public, and critiqued in several textual identities of which this autobiography is one. My discernment, my autonomy, my sense of personal agency is manifest, it seems to me, in this very writing. This writing is both the site and symbol of my resistance to the dominant ideology of my time and its major cultural manifestations. This resistance takes place with the aid of the great power of retrospect and hindsight and gives to much of life's messiness an order and shape. In the end, though, much is messiness, for not all of thought is ordered, tidy and logically sequential.

If I give to my life artistic form, spiritual vision and design in retrospect; if I discover a more profound truth in the context of this vision than an unfertilized collection of facts could deliver, I understand that is part of a design-imposed, meaning-making, process that I give to my life. Perhaps a great deal of what has happened to me is fate, destiny, a certain predestination. Such was the view Henry James took of his life when he wrote his autobiography in the evening of his life. There is little doubt of the importance of fate from a Baha’i perspective. I wish I could say in this context that my sentences had a quality of stunning exactitude, lyricism and comedy, an aphoristic concision but, alas, style is not a quality bestowed on me as it was on Flaubert. Perhaps this is because I have not been willing to work at it as obsessively as he over many decades. But I have made a start.

I wish I could also say, too, that I possessed the kind of grand and exuberant personality that the great twentieth century literary critic William Empson is reputed to have possessed. Such a personality would have been handy in so many of the social situations in life. So much of life has been social. That refined, sophisticated, and erudite scholar with his great reckless energy for life, with his willingness to throw his entire self into the interpretation and criticism of literature, William Empson had an energy and passion that informed his critical work and served to renew in the common reader a sense that there is some literature that can matter deeply to all and any of us. Alas, although I shared Empson’s energy it did not result in any literary erudition in my case; although, like Empson, I threw myself into my academic life in varying degrees with some success over half a century, I never made it to the major leagues. My destiny was to be a minor poet in the minor leagues. But I enjoyed playing poetic-ball in a small town in the minors. If you love playing ball part of you does not care where.

I was certainly not in the same league as Empson, arguably one of the three greatest literary critics in the last several hundred years; although we both had sexual proclivities and desires which, in the case of Empson, seemed to result in great notoriety. I had certainly experienced shame, fear and guilt in relation to my sexual urges and activities, among other sources of shame. Fear of exposure was very real and, after my young adulthood, I was not able to share my concerns with anyone except my wife. These were battles I fought, for the most part, on my own. Being honest about my failures in the sexual domain was virtually an impossible thing to do outside my immediate marital relationship. There simply was not the context, the relationship for such a degree of intimacy or confessionalism. And my religious values did not encourage such confessionalism.

People like myself write always, as Virginia Woolf puts it, "of the doings of the mind; the thoughts that come to it; its noble plans; how the mind has civilized the universe. They show it ignoring the body in the philosophers’ turret. Those great wars which the body wages with the mind a slave to it, in the solitude of the bedroom against the assault of fever or the onset of melancholia, are neglected. Nor is the reason far to seek. To look these things squarely in the face would need the courage of a lion tamer; a robust philosophy; a reason rooted in the bowels of the earth." I think in this two thousand page tomb I have shown some of the courage of a lion tamer; I have shown some of the robustness in my philosophy and some of reason’s bowels. I leave it to readers to judge how much.

These battles of my emotions in the lion tamers’ cage did not keep me away from God as many such battles do to others. My sense of unworthiness seemed instrumental in drawing me closer to God, to appreciating His forgiveness, something I was assured of over and over again by Baha’u’llah. I had right desire, but possessed wayward appetites, a sort of contagion of the lower self, part of an inward war made of thin but tough veils, battles which I often lost, susceptibilities of conscience which were simply not strong enough. I was not willing, or so it seemed, to burn the bridges across which certain sins continually came. In a world like this, in the darkest hours before the dawn, I was confident I had much company, company that ran into the millions—if not billions—in my sins of omission or commission.

Alcohol was never a problem for me as it was for Empson. Comparisons with others, of course, are sometimes useful but, as the cliché goes, comparisons are often odious. Autobiography's ultimate purpose, Henry James felt, was to fix the self for all time, to put forth the idea that the autobiographer matters and that his life is significant in the supposed order of things. I certainly like to think my life matters, that it has meaning in the ultimate scheme of things, that in writing this autobiography I am not merely imposing form on chaos, that all that I think is not merely an exercise in subjectivity, that my life is not so deeply private as to be beyond scientific scrutiny, that it derives its importance from factors beyond that which is unsystematic, even chaotic, uncommunicable and emotional in life.

The scientific domain contains an important element of subjectivity and total objectivity is always impossible. One of the key elements of science is that it exists in, indeed generates, a community, a framework, of interpretation. Indeed, the scientist can only function within such a community. That is also true, at least in some ways, for this autobiographer. The community in question for me is the Baha’i community and, more generally, the human community.

What makes my work scientific is that I am engaged in a "conscious, explicit organization of knowledge and experience." I am not just engaged in making true statements. One can do this in any quiz or game like trivial pursuit. Proof, in scientific terms and in autobiography, "means nothing more than the total process by which we render a statement more acceptable than its negation." An important caveat here is that the convictions I bring to this exercise, my feelings of certitude, indeed much that I might call tentative hypotheses for example, are part of a psychological state not part of my knowledge. Certitude can often be had with no knowledge at all and hypotheses are things anyone can make. Our emotions organize themselves around our convictions and become part of our way of life. This is one’s faith, one’s religion. And we all have a religion in this sense; there exists around this religion or faith a theoretical uncertainty and it exists for all of us. Such is some of the intellectual orientation, some of my foundation view, that I take to this autobiography.

Nothing convinces an artist more of the arbitrariness of the means to which he resorts to attain a goal, to assert this autonomy, however permanent it may be, than the creative process itself, the process of composition. The creative self, the source of this process, is a society of perishing occasions or selves and the context is an aesthetic one. The writer’s task is to develop a coherent system of ideas by which every item of his experience can be interpreted. The fundamental building blocks of nature are not bits of passive, inert, dead matter, but momentary unities of experience, actual entities which are involved in a creative advance into novelty. Such was Whitehead’s way of looking at the process. Although I have never been a serious student of Whitehead’s I have been broadly aware of his views for forty years.

Verse really does, in Akhmatova's words, grow from rubbish among other things. To express this same idea more elegantly, one could say that verse grows out of slime the same way as a lotus flower. The roots of prose are no more honorable. But there in the roots can also be found faith and thought--the lotus flower’s embryo. Without faith and thought no society can long endure and without a common humanity and a practical basis for world order appalling catastrophe threatens to engulf humanity.

As this autobiography has come to take form increasingly since I began writing it over twenty years ago, I have felt a measure of literary and psychological power and humility. Perhaps this is partly due to the fact that self-narrative is a tool used to gain self-determinacy. This work is also partly an illness narrative, partly a salvation narrative, partly a travel narrative, as autobiographers often call these sub-genres, and partly an act of becoming and re-becoming. Through self-narration I partly re-make myself, re-fashion and re-invent a new understanding of myself. With this story I try to resist the several disabling definitions that could label my life and so to write myself into/with a rhetorical normalcy. Narrative is used as a tool, a technology, that is intended to be a vehicle to freedom, self-definition, and self-expression. Unlike some writers, I have no obsession with being taken seriously. What consumes many words of many writers in an attempt to be taken seriously, consumes little of mine. I have not set this work before the public with the confidence, still less the complacency, of an established master. This book belongs to my middle and late adulthood. I had no reputation to defend, indeed, I was hardly known anywhere except by coteries so small and insignificant that it might be wondered why I bothered to write this work at all.

In some ways this book is a valediction to my international overseas pioneering experience as a formative event in my life and the lives of the many international pioneers. When an event ends, its history begins. The end of my venture is not yet, but it certainly feels like the beginning of the end or, as Churchill once said, the end of the beginning. As a project, this writing is understandably tinged with nostalgia, but that is a price I don’t mind paying for what happens with greater intensity when I write. Most works of history are generated by some personal experience and intellectual debate would be more fruitful if historians admitted from the beginning that they were writing, at least in part, about themselves. As autobiographer I have no problem with such an admission. By placing my own experience within my work there is an honesty in my attempt to understand myself and the world with which I deal. There is also a kind of parallel between the traveller, the pioneer, writing retrospectively to give shape and meaning to his experience, and the historian giving shape and meaning not only to his own intellectual travels but to the part of the story of history that he writes.

Autobiographies, and certainly the one I am writing here, are not playbacks of life events. They require a point of view from which past events are tied together and are made relevant for a here and now, with an eye on the autobiographer’s future orientations. I am quite conscious, as Jerome Bruner points out too, that my memories often become victims of my self-making stories.

And so it is that the self, myself, becomes a product of my telling and not some essence to be delved for in the recesses of my subjectivity. My narrative, my memoir, grants to this written context of storytelling, this social setting on paper, what might be called certain literary privileges that are unique to this setting, that are different than the context, the setting that would exist, and does exist, when I tell the story orally, in a short essay form or in a poem.

Salman Rushdie said at a conference recently that he found it interesting that the organizers would invite him, a writer, to speak at a conference about communication. "Writers don’t speak, writers write," he said. By the time I came to write full-time in my mid-fifties, I had had 50 years of talking and listening in great quantities and I did not mind not speaking; indeed, I preferred quiet. I was ready for the writing art. My corridor of flesh, of skin, bones and fluid, a corridor that allows language an access to the direct experience of writing as well as what one is writing about, enjoyed what Helene Cixous called in her equating of body and text, the pleasure of writing and the pleasure of sexuality/sensuality. In writing, the self folds around absences and my writing functions as a substitute for the social, the sexual, the verbal. My whole body is poised in between and resonates with, movements, spilling toward words that mark out the journey along the markings on the page. Running between the blue lines, the movement out of nothing takes my senses beyond the limit of skin, beyond the optic nerve, beyond the tas